In The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (1976), the his­to­rian Carlo Ginzburg recounts the story of a miller’s life in the XVIth cen­tury who was arrested and exe­cuted by the Church because of his rad­ical ideas about Christianity. Through an inves­tiga­tive study of archival mate­rial, Ginzburg exam­ines and inter­prets the signs and traces left by this meta­physi­cian miller’s thought, revealing the pop­ular cul­ture of the time. This nar­ra­tive is a sym­bolic example of Ginzburg’s notion of micros­toria: by reducing the scope of obser­va­tion, one can expand the field of History towards unique sto­ries.

The exhi­bi­tion "About Menocchio we know many things." uses the micro-his­tor­ical method of Carlo Ginzburg to shed light on indi­vidual paths, specif­i­cally drawing atten­tion to those little con­sid­ered by tra­di­tional his­to­ri­og­raphy. Gathering works by artists, writers, soci­ol­o­gists and activists from 1960s until today the exhi­bi­tion tries to make vis­ible diverse forms of resis­tance to the for­mat­ting of a glob­alised world. In giving par­tic­ular atten­tion to details, clues or frag­ments, "About Menocchio we know many things." explores the poten­tial of agency and empow­er­ment of these sin­gular posi­tions through art and nar­ra­tive.